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Remembering 9/11

It seems presumptuous for an Australian to be talking about 9/11 and yet it was an event which affected us all, wherever we lived, and yes it’s right that we should also record our memories for our descendants as suggested by Thomas MacEntee at Geneabloggers..

On 11 September 2001, we were woken by a call from our daughter interstate soon after 10.15pm…her message seemed garbled, something about a plane and the World Trade Centre. It made no sense but we turned on the TV as directed and to our horror saw the recurring image of the first plane impacting the WTC. We phoned our other two daughters who lived in Darwin not far away and they jumped in the car in their pyjamas to head to our place as we had cable TV.

Incredulous we watched as the second plane smashed into the towers. There was no chance now that this had been some kind of bizarre pilot error and accident. Like the usually case-hardened CNN journalists we couldn’t assimilate what we were seeing as the vision rolled again and again, as if by watching it would suddenly somehow make sense.

Image from Wikipedia Commons.

We were aghast as the tower crumbled like some giant disintegrating sand castle … stunned, horrified. How to reconcile that with the gorgeous views we’d seen from the WTC less than 10 years before, the thoughts of the poinsettias and the Christmas fairy lights in the foyer, people going about their business.

My thoughts turned to a couple of our 4th year medical students from the Northern Territory Clinical School who were doing clinical rotations in New York. I feared for what they would see and have to deal with in the coming hours, with visions of ambulances screaming towards hospitals. As the clock ticked round, the reality dawned and it was so much sadder and more sobering…there would be no overloaded emergency departments, the loss of human life was enormous. No longer much of a praying person I prayed for all those lost and especially their families.

We watched for hours as the stories unravelled: the Pentagon, people jumping to their deaths, firemen climbing the stairs as others came down (how much courage did that take?); farewell in-flight phone calls to families (a blessing or a horror?).

You’re right about the value of everyone’s memories and experience of 9/11; it will probably be one of the defining events of the century. We’d moved back to New Zealand from the UK about a year before, and the “honeymoon” with the land of our childhoods had pretty much ended. We were seriously thinking about going back to England, and in fact my husband had been talking to his old employer about jobs. Then we watched – in fascination and disbelief – as the towers came down, and we realised that the world had become a different place in those few hours and that maybe being tucked away in a little corner of the South Pacific wouldn’t be so bad – at least while our son (who was three at the time), was growing up.

That’s so interesting Su, there are certainly times when it feels better to be far away but still we’d be foolish to think it could never to happen to us. Not that I mean that in a “Reds under the Beds” kind of way.

I often wonder how many nations were represented in the lives lost. People came from all points of the globe to work at the Towers. At times I also wonder how any nation in this world would give safe haven to those who are capable of this much hatred. There are many who hate us Americans, that’s a given, but to harbor and support the evil that would plot such a massive murder of that magnitude makes me sick. Why are they not concerned about their own country’s safety?
I too watched for hours, days and weeks people searching for their loved ones and friends. The survivors stories, the victims stories it just never seemed to end.

It was a defining moment for all of us I think and it’s always hard to grasp why others will so willingly take innocent lives in the name of their cause. In some ways it still hasn’t ended, almost certainly so for those who lost loved ones in such terrible circumstances.

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